I'm flattered, moderators. Thanks. Meanwhile here's a cutting from the New York Times you might be interested in:
In an article coming next week in Harper's, Greg Palast, who originally reported the story of the 2000 felon list, reveals that few of those wrongly purged from the voting rolls in 2000 are back on the voter lists. State officials have imposed Kafkaesque hurdles for voters trying to get back on the rolls. Depending on the county, those attempting to get their votes back have been required to seek clemency for crimes committed by others, or to go through quasi-judicial proceedings to prove that they are not felons with similar names.
And officials appear to be doing their best to make voting difficult for those blacks who do manage to register. Florida law requires local election officials to provide polling places where voters can cast early ballots. Duval County is providing only one such location, when other counties with similar voting populations are providing multiple sites. And in Duval and other counties the early voting sites are miles away from precincts with black majorities.
When the same thing happens in Florida again I will try not to link to the above post. It will be tricky though. Enjoy your elections.
This is really a load of shit that should be placed in a tin foil hat.
I really wish it was. Unfortunately it's too well documented. Katharine Harris has admitted to the fraud (she was even successfully sued by the NAACP) and I cannot find one single rebuff of Greg Palast or BBC Newsnight's reporting of the subject that holds water for five minutes.
For starters, ballots don't show what color you are.
Of course not but you'll notice I didn't say that - I said voters rolls. The list of "felons" to scrub was given to Harris by private contractor ChoicePoint whose ties with the GOP are, shall we say, strong. All sorts of deliberate errors were made in the scrubbing process, costing Gore a minimum 22 000 votes on election day 2000. Don't take my word for it - check it out. Do the background reading. Get a copy of the Best Democracy Money can Buy. Watch the Newsnight special which had an election official ripping off his mike and running to lock himself in his office when confronted with a secret document from Jeb Bush's office. Check Greg Palast's record and see how many times he's been wrong. Get the other side of the story as well from the quotes from the Governor's office. But don't just label it tinfoil hat stuff until you've done the research. Actually I think I've described your country and media's problem right there: too little journalism and not enough independence and questioning of authority.
Two, for such a conspiracy to happen, the perpetrators would also remove many white votes as well if they were attempting such a lamebrain idea over county or district lines.
You would think so wouldn't you? But they really were as stupid as that. And they were caught.
Actually I heard that the problem in 2000 was that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris illegally struck tens of thousands of black voters off the rolls, voters who would have voted overwhelmingly Democrat. But then I don't have access to the US lapdog media so I have to rely on sources like the BBC, the Guardian, the Independent and Greg Palast.
Investigative journos use people with computer skills all the time. Greg Palast used some help to decrpyt two CDs with rather embarrassing info to Jeb Bush and Katharine Harris a couple of years back. As a journo and a hacker, I find the two pursuits quite similar in many ways: solving problems, finding the truth, trying to understand what's under the surface and so on.
Paul Allen, who knew Bill Gates mother from their work on charity boards, asked "What about Mary Gates boy? I hear he works with these things."
Right quote (almost), right context, wrong attribution. It was actually the chairman of IBM John Opel who said that when he heard that Don Estridge was working with Microsoft. He and Mary Gates had bumped into each other at the United Way board. The quote is "that wouldn't be Mary Gates's boy Bill would it?" (Big Blues, Paul Carroll, pp 33-34)
Why won't Microsoft bring Office to Linux? Because that would undercut the Windows business.
No - this is incidental. As I have commented before, the real reason that Microsoft will never port Office to Linux is that Linus has said that if the company ever does that "then I've won." You be absolutely sure that Bill Gates, who is obsessed with winning above all other things (yes the money is incidental) knows this quote.
If this site is can not be visited, try alternatively the following URL (this is an other server and can not be destroyed): http://www.hdr-see.de/
Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bare thy server away to the Houses of Lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy processes shall be devoured and thy shriviled configs be left naked to the lidless eye."
There was a time when programming meant the encoding of finely-honed algorithms, parsimoniously pruned to the fewest possible instructions; algorithms which would then also have utilized the least amount of memory for execution.
That time for me was this morning. My clients still appreciate small, fast code that can be developed quickly, doesn't fall over and is agile enough to adapt to new requirements. Most of it is in Python, some of it is in Pyrex or C and yeah, some of it is still in assembly. Assembly is not a waste of time or a hangover from the Apollo days but a useful addition to any coder's arsenal especially given the insight into Leaky Abtractions that it brings. YMMV of course - asm is really not required for high-level business apps but it comes in really handy for certain kinds of video processing.
The vast majority of coding today is ignorant of such constraints. A 2K limit for even the simplest of applications -- even those written in Java, which was ostensibly designed to minimize an executable's footprint -- would today be considered absurd. And that's just for the minimalist application. Never mind the JVM, which is sort of required for anything meaningful to occur. But an entire operating system squeezed into 2K? It is obvious that the skills required for a successful programmer in 1969 are very different from the skills required for a successful programmer today.
And yet they're surprisingly similar. Given:
this set of instructions
this manual on how to use them (sometimes incomplete or even misleading)
this platform
your willingness to learn new techniques and technologies and
a considerable degree of focus and dedication
can you do X for us in time T? I contend that all programming is about limitations and overcoming them: whether they be memory, time, operating system capability or human. No super-genetically evolved system is going to replace a smart human anytime soon. This guy needs to do two things: a) learn a real programming language and b) read the Mythical Man Month. There are no silver bullets.
That hasn't stopped various hackers from getting a demo working for the X5. If enough people are interested in these models, the hardware will be reverse-engineered and Linux ported.
Gold *is* a particularly useful metal viz (shamelessly pasted from wikipedia):
Because of its superior electrical conductivity and resistance to corrosion and other desirable combinations of physical and chemical properties, gold also emerged in the late 20th century as an essential industrial metal. Other uses:
Gold performs critical functions in computers, communications equipment, spacecraft, jet aircraft engines, and a host of other products.
The high electrical conductivity and resistance to oxidation of gold has led to its widespread use as thin layers electroplated on the surface of electrical connectors to ensure a good, low-resistance connection.
Like silver, gold can form a hard amalgam with mercury, and is sometimes used for dental fillings.
Colloidal gold (gold nanoparticles) is an intensely colored solution that is currently studied in many labs for medical, biological and other applications. It is also the form used as gold paint on ceramics prior to firing.
Chlorauric acid is used in photography for toning the silver image.
Disodium aurothiomalate is a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis (administered intramuscularly).
The gold isotope Au-198, (half-life: 2.7 days) is used in some cancer treatments and for treating other diseases.
Gold is used as a coating enabling biological material to be viewed under a scanning electron microscope.
Since it is a good reflector of both infrared and visible light, it is used for the protective coatings on many artificial satellites.
Sorry I should have explained the context a bit further. Winston is writing in his diary (itself an offence punishable by death) about how the dominance of the Party could be broken. He knows that despite the destruction of uncomfortable records of the past by the Party, he knows they have falsified history because he has his own memory of at least one incident where he held the evidence in his hand. I won't spoil it it for you in case you haven't read the book but you can read it all online here
I thought it was quite chilling actually. It's from the first line of Ch.7 of 1984:
If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet-!
Long story short, there are two minorities that are involved here. One minority is the group that wants to stop this horrible form of "legal" corruption. The second minority are those in government which benefit from it. Sadly, it's the second group with all the power. This leaves the "unwashed masses" as our only hope. Needless to say, these are the people most easily swayed by the power of the corrupt beneficiaries.
"If there is hope, it lies in the proles" - Winston Smith, 1984.
If you're not sure how test-first development works Mark Pilgrim's chapter on the subject (and the following one too) is an excellent introduction for Python programmers. I personally don't think test-driven development is a catch-all but at least he shows it in action so you can decide whether you want to go this route.
But if MS decided to write code for a new OS which the management suddenly stopped skrewing over, and everyone on the team could have free constructive reign on their coding, there would be alot more motivated, harder motivated, programmers on that project.
Don't get me wrong - I think there are a lot of brilliant and hard-working programmers who work at Microsoft. In fact you have to be realy really good to even get in there. I read Joel Spolsky (an ex-Microsoftie) regularly and some Microsoft blogs and these guys are far more talented (and wealthy because of it) than I'll ever be.
Alot of people that aren't completely struck against MS by principle (those with open minds?), and those people would have a hayday if you ask me.
Here you've hit on the reason people enjoy working on FLOSS (Free, Libre and Open Source Software): it's fun and the terms of the licenses nearly always mean that a corporation can't take their work and give nothing back.
P.S. It seems there is an evil moral background for MS. Could someone please define this versus any other large corporation?
Microsoft is a baby when compared to organisations like Monsanto, the Federal Government and say, SBC. The reason many people on/. take it personally is because the attacks are personal: the company lies, cheats, steals other companies IP, calls Linux a cancer, Communistic, unAmerican, and a toy - and fights it with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of marketing. I know this gets up my nose because I wrote some of that code it attacks (very very little but still).
MS? Not enough resources? Name one program (including any distro of linux & the kernel) that they couldn't have a staff working harder on than. Its a matter of money, which MS just happens to have an unpractical surplus of.
This is a common misconception, thinking that unlimited resources means you can get code done more quickly. It's not true for three reasons. One is a corollary of Brooks' Law (adding programmers to a late project makes it later) which says that the the time spent communicating increases with the square of the number of programmers - at the expense of real programming. This can easily be seen in practice where all of Microsoft's unlimited resources seem to be powerless against security problems with its software.
Secondly, programmers are creative, fallible and frail humans that can only work so fast, some more than others of course but there is a limit. Thirdly, money is a bad motivator of programmers, especially the very best ones. Besides, it's not just a matter of money. There are tens of thousands of very brilliant programmers who will never ever work for Microsoft just on principle no matter how much money they were offered, and are therefore cannot be called upon by Microsoft.
Free software is still limited to the number of people who are willing to work on free software, let alone specific projects.
You make it sound like Microsoft has the edge in number of programmers here whereas it is in fact outnumbered by at least 1000 to 1 developer-wise.
24. So why is this called `Trusted Computing'? I don't see why I should trust it at all!
It's almost an in-joke. In the US Department of Defense, a `trusted system or component' is defined as `one which can break the security policy'. This might seem counter-intuitive at first, but just stop to think about it. The mail guard or firewall that stands between a Secret and a Top Secret system can - if it fails - break the security policy that mail should only ever flow from Secret to Top Secret, but never in the other direction. It is therefore trusted to enforce the information flow policy.
Or take a civilian example: suppose you trust your doctor to keep your medical records private. This means that he has access to your records, so he could leak them to the press if he were careless or malicious. You don't trust me to keep your medical records, because I don't have them; regardless of whether I like you or hate you, I can't do anything to affect your policy that your medical records should be confidential. Your doctor can, though; and the fact that he is in a position to harm you is really what is meant (at a system level) when you say that you trust him. You may have a warm feeling about him, or you may just have to trust him because he is the only doctor on the island where you live; no matter, the DoD definition strips away these fuzzy, emotional aspects of `trust' (that can confuse people).
During the late 1990s, as people debated government control over cryptography, Al Gore proposed a `Trusted Third Party' - a service that would keep a copy of your decryption key safe, just in case you (or the FBI, or the NSA) ever needed it. The name was derided as the sort of marketing exercise that saw the Russian colony of East Germany called the `German Democratic Republic'. But it really does chime with DoD thinking. A Trusted Third Party is a third party that can break your security policy.
25. So a `Trusted Computer' is a computer that can break my security?
That's a polite way of putting it.
"Trust" here has nothing to do with you trusting a chip or feeling warm and fuzzy about trust that was earned.
Or perhaps a well-considered exposition on how Nelson Mandela, liberal-champion-extraordinaire openly supports the genocidal outlook of Robert Mugabe.
Bzzzt. Nelson Mandela is one of the (very) few African leaders to have openly condemned Mugabe for his policies. Thabo Mbeki, his successor, on the other hand...
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the reply. It will take me a while to check out what you've said but this quote of yours is truly frightening:
Bottom line, while I don't doubt that some African-American voters were disenfranchised, maybe even enough to change the outcome,
Doesn't this bother you just a teeny bit? The man claiming to be president might not be?
I'm flattered, moderators. Thanks. Meanwhile here's a cutting from the New York Times you might be interested in:
In an article coming next week in Harper's, Greg Palast, who originally reported the story of the 2000 felon list, reveals that few of those wrongly purged from the voting rolls in 2000 are back on the voter lists. State officials have imposed Kafkaesque hurdles for voters trying to get back on the rolls. Depending on the county, those attempting to get their votes back have been required to seek clemency for crimes committed by others, or to go through quasi-judicial proceedings to prove that they are not felons with similar names.
And officials appear to be doing their best to make voting difficult for those blacks who do manage to register. Florida law requires local election officials to provide polling places where voters can cast early ballots. Duval County is providing only one such location, when other counties with similar voting populations are providing multiple sites. And in Duval and other counties the early voting sites are miles away from precincts with black majorities.
When the same thing happens in Florida again I will try not to link to the above post. It will be tricky though. Enjoy your elections.
This is really a load of shit that should be placed in a tin foil hat.
I really wish it was. Unfortunately it's too well documented. Katharine Harris has admitted to the fraud (she was even successfully sued by the NAACP) and I cannot find one single rebuff of Greg Palast or BBC Newsnight's reporting of the subject that holds water for five minutes.
For starters, ballots don't show what color you are.
Of course not but you'll notice I didn't say that - I said voters rolls. The list of "felons" to scrub was given to Harris by private contractor ChoicePoint whose ties with the GOP are, shall we say, strong. All sorts of deliberate errors were made in the scrubbing process, costing Gore a minimum 22 000 votes on election day 2000.
Don't take my word for it - check it out. Do the background reading. Get a copy of the Best Democracy Money can Buy. Watch the Newsnight special which had an election official ripping off his mike and running to lock himself in his office when confronted with a secret document from Jeb Bush's office. Check Greg Palast's record and see how many times he's been wrong. Get the other side of the story as well from the quotes from the Governor's office.
But don't just label it tinfoil hat stuff until you've done the research. Actually I think I've described your country and media's problem right there: too little journalism and not enough independence and questioning of authority.
Two, for such a conspiracy to happen, the perpetrators would also remove many white votes as well if they were attempting such a lamebrain idea over county or district lines.
You would think so wouldn't you? But they really were as stupid as that. And they were caught.
Actually I heard that the problem in 2000 was that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris illegally struck tens of thousands of black voters off the rolls, voters who would have voted overwhelmingly Democrat. But then I don't have access to the US lapdog media so I have to rely on sources like the BBC, the Guardian, the Independent and Greg Palast.
Investigative journos use people with computer skills all the time. Greg Palast used some help to decrpyt two CDs with rather embarrassing info to Jeb Bush and Katharine Harris a couple of years back. As a journo and a hacker, I find the two pursuits quite similar in many ways: solving problems, finding the truth, trying to understand what's under the surface and so on.
I see that you must have taken the advice in your sig. Very informative stuff.
It is right. Gentoo users are incapable of lying.
of course I could just be making all this up :)
Paul Allen, who knew Bill Gates mother from their work on charity boards, asked "What about Mary Gates boy? I hear he works with these things."
Right quote (almost), right context, wrong attribution. It was actually the chairman of IBM John Opel who said that when he heard that Don Estridge was working with Microsoft. He and Mary Gates had bumped into each other at the United Way board. The quote is "that wouldn't be Mary Gates's boy Bill would it?" (Big Blues, Paul Carroll, pp 33-34)
Why won't Microsoft bring Office to Linux? Because that would undercut the Windows business.
No - this is incidental. As I have commented before, the real reason that Microsoft will never port Office to Linux is that Linus has said that if the company ever does that "then I've won." You be absolutely sure that Bill Gates, who is obsessed with winning above all other things (yes the money is incidental) knows this quote.
If this site is can not be visited, try alternatively the following URL (this is an other server and can not be destroyed): http://www.hdr-see.de/
Or he will not slay thee in thy turn. He will bare thy server away to the Houses of Lamentation, beyond all darkness, where thy processes shall be devoured and thy shriviled configs be left naked to the lidless eye."
That time for me was this morning. My clients still appreciate small, fast code that can be developed quickly, doesn't fall over and is agile enough to adapt to new requirements. Most of it is in Python, some of it is in Pyrex or C and yeah, some of it is still in assembly. Assembly is not a waste of time or a hangover from the Apollo days but a useful addition to any coder's arsenal especially given the insight into Leaky Abtractions that it brings. YMMV of course - asm is really not required for high-level business apps but it comes in really handy for certain kinds of video processing.
The vast majority of coding today is ignorant of such constraints. A 2K limit for even the simplest of applications -- even those written in Java, which was ostensibly designed to minimize an executable's footprint -- would today be considered absurd. And that's just for the minimalist application. Never mind the JVM, which is sort of required for anything meaningful to occur. But an entire operating system squeezed into 2K? It is obvious that the skills required for a successful programmer in 1969 are very different from the skills required for a successful programmer today.
And yet they're surprisingly similar. Given:
can you do X for us in time T? I contend that all programming is about limitations and overcoming them: whether they be memory, time, operating system capability or human. No super-genetically evolved system is going to replace a smart human anytime soon. This guy needs to do two things: a) learn a real programming language and b) read the Mythical Man Month. There are no silver bullets.
Mynd you, McBride søund bites Kan be pretty nasti...
That hasn't stopped various hackers from getting a demo working for the X5. If enough people are interested in these models, the hardware will be reverse-engineered and Linux ported.
Because of its superior electrical conductivity and resistance to corrosion and other desirable combinations of physical and chemical properties, gold also emerged in the late 20th century as an essential industrial metal. Other uses:
Pleasure. I re-read it once a year just to remind myself of those words - and plenty more besides.
Sorry I should have explained the context a bit further. Winston is writing in his diary (itself an offence punishable by death) about how the dominance of the Party could be broken. He knows that despite the destruction of uncomfortable records of the past by the Party, he knows they have falsified history because he has his own memory of at least one incident where he held the evidence in his hand.
I won't spoil it it for you in case you haven't read the book but you can read it all online here
I thought it was quite chilling actually. It's from the first line of Ch.7 of 1984:
If there is hope, wrote Winston, it lies in the proles.
If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within. Its enemies, if it had any enemies, had no way of coming together or even of identifying one another. Even if the legendary Brotherhood existed, as just possibly it might, it was inconceivable that its members could ever assemble in larger numbers than twos and threes. Rebellion meant a look in the eyes, an inflexion of the voice, at the most, an occasional whispered word. But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet-!
Long story short, there are two minorities that are involved here. One minority is the group that wants to stop this horrible form of "legal" corruption. The second minority are those in government which benefit from it. Sadly, it's the second group with all the power. This leaves the "unwashed masses" as our only hope. Needless to say, these are the people most easily swayed by the power of the corrupt beneficiaries.
"If there is hope, it lies in the proles" - Winston Smith, 1984.
If you're not sure how test-first development works Mark Pilgrim's chapter on the subject (and the following one too) is an excellent introduction for Python programmers. I personally don't think test-driven development is a catch-all but at least he shows it in action so you can decide whether you want to go this route.
Never mind - 1 out of 28407 Slashdot users with mod points today found your post useful.
But if MS decided to write code for a new OS which the management suddenly stopped skrewing over, and everyone on the team could have free constructive reign on their coding, there would be alot more motivated, harder motivated, programmers on that project.
/. take it personally is because the attacks are personal: the company lies, cheats, steals other companies IP, calls Linux a cancer, Communistic, unAmerican, and a toy - and fights it with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of marketing. I know this gets up my nose because I wrote some of that code it attacks (very very little but still).
Don't get me wrong - I think there are a lot of brilliant and hard-working programmers who work at Microsoft. In fact you have to be realy really good to even get in there. I read Joel Spolsky (an ex-Microsoftie) regularly and some Microsoft blogs and these guys are far more talented (and wealthy because of it) than I'll ever be.
Alot of people that aren't completely struck against MS by principle (those with open minds?), and those people would have a hayday if you ask me.
Here you've hit on the reason people enjoy working on FLOSS (Free, Libre and Open Source Software): it's fun and the terms of the licenses nearly always mean that a corporation can't take their work and give nothing back.
P.S. It seems there is an evil moral background for MS. Could someone please define this versus any other large corporation?
Microsoft is a baby when compared to organisations like Monsanto, the Federal Government and say, SBC. The reason many people on
MS? Not enough resources? Name one program (including any distro of linux & the kernel) that they couldn't have a staff working harder on than. Its a matter of money, which MS just happens to have an unpractical surplus of.
This is a common misconception, thinking that unlimited resources means you can get code done more quickly. It's not true for three reasons. One is a corollary of Brooks' Law (adding programmers to a late project makes it later) which says that the the time spent communicating increases with the square of the number of programmers - at the expense of real programming. This can easily be seen in practice where all of Microsoft's unlimited resources seem to be powerless against security problems with its software.
Secondly, programmers are creative, fallible and frail humans that can only work so fast, some more than others of course but there is a limit. Thirdly, money is a bad motivator of programmers, especially the very best ones.
Besides, it's not just a matter of money. There are tens of thousands of very brilliant programmers who will never ever work for Microsoft just on principle no matter how much money they were offered, and are therefore cannot be called upon by Microsoft.
Free software is still limited to the number of people who are willing to work on free software, let alone specific projects.
You make it sound like Microsoft has the edge in number of programmers here whereas it is in fact outnumbered by at least 1000 to 1 developer-wise.
From the Trusted Computing FAQ:
24. So why is this called `Trusted Computing'? I don't see why I should trust it at all!
It's almost an in-joke. In the US Department of Defense, a `trusted system or component' is defined as `one which can break the security policy'. This might seem counter-intuitive at first, but just stop to think about it. The mail guard or firewall that stands between a Secret and a Top Secret system can - if it fails - break the security policy that mail should only ever flow from Secret to Top Secret, but never in the other direction. It is therefore trusted to enforce the information flow policy.
Or take a civilian example: suppose you trust your doctor to keep your medical records private. This means that he has access to your records, so he could leak them to the press if he were careless or malicious. You don't trust me to keep your medical records, because I don't have them; regardless of whether I like you or hate you, I can't do anything to affect your policy that your medical records should be confidential. Your doctor can, though; and the fact that he is in a position to harm you is really what is meant (at a system level) when you say that you trust him. You may have a warm feeling about him, or you may just have to trust him because he is the only doctor on the island where you live; no matter, the DoD definition strips away these fuzzy, emotional aspects of `trust' (that can confuse people).
During the late 1990s, as people debated government control over cryptography, Al Gore proposed a `Trusted Third Party' - a service that would keep a copy of your decryption key safe, just in case you (or the FBI, or the NSA) ever needed it. The name was derided as the sort of marketing exercise that saw the Russian colony of East Germany called the `German Democratic Republic'. But it really does chime with DoD thinking. A Trusted Third Party is a third party that can break your security policy.
25. So a `Trusted Computer' is a computer that can break my security?
That's a polite way of putting it.
"Trust" here has nothing to do with you trusting a chip or feeling warm and fuzzy about trust that was earned.
Or perhaps a well-considered exposition on how Nelson Mandela, liberal-champion-extraordinaire openly supports the genocidal outlook of Robert Mugabe.
Bzzzt. Nelson Mandela is one of the (very) few African leaders to have openly condemned Mugabe for his policies. Thabo Mbeki, his successor, on the other hand...